30.2 Navigation in the Dired Buffer

All the usual Emacs cursor motion commands are available in Dired
buffers. The keys C-n and C-p are redefined to put the
cursor at the beginning of the file name on the line, rather than at
the beginning of the line.

For extra convenience, <SPC> and n in Dired are equivalent
to C-n. p is equivalent to C-p. (Moving by lines
is so common in Dired that it deserves to be easy to type.) <DEL>
(move up and unflag) is also often useful simply for moving up
(see Dired Deletion).

j (dired-goto-file) prompts for a file name using the
minibuffer, and moves point to the line in the Dired buffer describing
that file.

M-s f C-s (dired-isearch-filenames) performs a forward
incremental search in the Dired buffer, looking for matches only
amongst the file names and ignoring the rest of the text in the
buffer. M-s f M-C-s (dired-isearch-filenames-regexp)
does the same, using a regular expression search. If you change the
variable dired-isearch-filenames to t, then the
usual search commands also limit themselves to the file names; for
instance, C-s behaves like M-s f C-s. If the value is
dwim, then search commands match the file names only when point
was on a file name initially. See Search, for information about
incremental search.

Some additional navigation commands are available when the Dired
buffer includes several directories. See Subdirectory Motion.